Demand for providing multimedia content continues to grow, and content can be delivered anywhere at any time. Users are pleased with the convenience and flexibility, and are able to enjoy entertainment easily and efficiently.
Content owners endeavor to satisfy the needs of their users, but at the same time are concerned about the unauthorized use of their intellectual property. There is a balance between these two concerns.
Numerous protection methods for protecting content are available, including data encryption, watermarking, and password protection. These protection methods are used by numerous content provider applications. It appears that different systems provide protected content using different mechanisms and protection methods. All terminals and content consumption devices in this case simply run and consume content provided by the same content provider. With the above-noted protection methods it is not possible to exchange these terminals or devices and play back different content.
People in the MPEG Standards Group are working toward standardizing an IPMP System with a compliant terminal. Regardless of the type of IPMP Tools used, all terminals can play back protected content protected by encryption according the same IPMP standard such as described below.
Terminals such as this have a content decoder such as an audio and video decoder, and must be able to remove the protection from the protected content before the content can be decoded and played back. Protection information including an IPMP Tool List is therefore needed to understand how to remove the protection, and is needed for a terminal to be able to use the content.
IPMP Tools are not fixed to certain predetermined tools. This involves using a header to increase the flexibility whereby the tools preferred by a particular IPMP System can be selected. To achieve this, however, it is necessary to define a standard method and interface that can simultaneously provide both greater flexibility and security.
The prior art relating to terminals of this type is basically as shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows the task flow through real-time user authentication, IPMP Tool searching, and content decoding.
Different headers use the same content decoders, such as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, but user authentication and IPMP Tool searches in the prior art are performed completely differently with different headers. This makes it extremely difficult to manufacture a single terminal that can run different content provided by different content providers. In other words, the same protected content cannot be played back using different IPMP Systems.